lowry’s narrative art: “less like a book of tales than a novel… more interrelated than it looks”

 

 

"Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place" is a Manx fishermen’s hymn, invoking God’s aid to "little barks" on a "raging" sea.

 

 

Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, by Malcolm Lowry (1961), and published posthumously, won the 1961 Governor General’s Award. It is a collection of 7 interrelated stories and novellas forming a shared thematic structure and unity of movement. Set in British Columbia, the stories feature 5 protagonists with different names and nationalities, but these characters are primarily aspects of one personality, a man who is undergoing a journey of self-discovery. These central characters are estranged from nature, tyrannized by the past, concerned about the ugly encroachment of civilization, and occasionally misanthropic. However, the final story becomes a lyrical affirmation of the joy of living, as the narrator achieves harmony and balance through his acceptance of the world around him.

 

—from Donna Coates, The Canadian Encyclopedia

 

 

A group of Malcolm Lowry’s stories, entitled Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, was published posthumously in 1961. In a letter (written in 1952) Lowry commented that Hear Us O Lord "seems to be shaping up less like an ordinary book of tales than a sort of novel of an odd aeolian kind . . ., i.e. it is more interrelated than it looks."¹ In the published version of this work there is a sense of overarching design. Recurring motifs (such as "Frere Jacques"), a common setting in many cases, and a restricted number of characters who reappear (or are referred to) throughout the tales link the individual stories. Further unity is given to the component pieces of Hear Us O Lord by a structural pattern that is circular in nature. With the opening story set in British Columbia, followed by an account of a sea voyage to Europe, which in turn is followed by three tales set in Italy, and finally a return to the setting of British Columbia for the two concluding tales, the collective form of the book is that of a single, continuous journey. Another major feature that contributes to the unity of Hear Us O Lord, and the focus of this essay, is a thematic concern shared by the diverse tales: the significance of the past…

 

The penultimate story of Hear Us O Lord, "Gin and Goldenrod," returns (like Fairhaven’s thoughts) to British Columbia for its setting. In this brief story the characters, who are again Sigbjørn and his wife Primrose, visit a bootlegger’s house, where Sigbjørn pays for all the bottles of gin that he drank the previous Sunday, and then they return to their home on the beach. The financial transaction can be viewed as a sorting out and a reckoning of a past incident blanked out by alcohol (the major theme of October Ferry to Gabriola). Because Primrose on the way home informs her husband that she has retrieved a bottle of gin which he had thought was lost, there is also a notion of salvage from the past: "a kind of hope began to bloom again" (p. 214). The goldenrod of the story’s title contributes to this regenerative mood, representing the growth and renewal in nature that is the converse of its latent destructive capacity depicted in the previous tale by Mount Vesuvius. Thus, "Gin and Goldenrod," with its ambiguous title, functions as a thematic bridge between "Present Estate of Pompeii" and "The Forest Path to the Spring" by indicating that with an honest reckoning of the past there can be optimism about the future.

 

¹ Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, eds. Harvey Breit and Margerie B. Lowry (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961), p, 320. Lowry’s covert allusion to Coleridge’s "The Aeolian Harp" is explicated by W.H. New:

 

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

 

Lowry, obviously, saw his stories both as separate entities and as a unified organic whole. Coleridge’s lines serve both to remind us of the technical structure — the use of analogues, motifs, images — that provides this unity, and to focus our attention on the work’s intellectual basis. The ‘diverse frame’ of each story is animated by a mind that is aware of its own simultaneous unity and variability." "A Note on Romantic Allusions in Hear Us O Lord," Studies in Canadian Literature, 1 (1977), p. 13 1.

 

—from Keith Harrison, “Malcolm Lowry’s Hear Us O Lord: Visions and Revisions of the Past,” Studies in Canadian Literature 6.2 (1981).

(Detail from Charles Sheeler’s "Upper Deck").